Still Life with Crows

by Preston; Child

  Ridder spoke, his voice calmer. “Mr. Pendergast, may I invite you to my office, where you’ll find it much more comfortable?”

  “I have a few questions for Mr. Breen here.”

  “I’ll send Jimmy right over. Bart will show you the way.”

  “There is no need to interrupt his work.”

  “It’ll be much quieter in the office—”

  But Pendergast was already talking to Jimmy. The man continued to work, sticking a nozzle into a turkey and sucking out the guts with a greatschloock! while he talked. He glanced at Ridder and then at Pendergast.

  “Mr. Breen, I understand you were the last one to see Willie Stott alive.”

  “I was, I was,” Jimmy began. “The poor guy. It was that car of his. I hate to say this, but the money he should’ve spent getting that crap-mobile fixed up he spent down at Swede’s instead. That hunk of junk was always breaking down—”

  Corrie glanced at Art Ridder, who was standing behind Jimmy now, the ghastly smile once again fixed on his face.

  “Jimmy,” Ridder interrupted, “the nozzle goesall the way up, not like that. Excuse me, Mr. Pendergast, but it’s his first day on this job.”

  “Yes, Mr. Ridder,” said Jimmy.

  “Up,like that. Up and in, as deep as it’ll go.” He shoved the hose in and out of the carcass a few times to demonstrate, then handed it back to Jimmy. “You following me?” Then he turned to Pendergast with a smile. “I started right here, Mr. Pendergast, in the Evisceration Area. Worked my way to the top. I like to see things done right.” There was a note of pride in his voice that Corrie found creepy.

  “Sure thing, Mr. Ridder,” Jimmy said.

  “As you were saying?” Pendergast kept his eyes on Breen.

  “Right. Only last month Willie’s car broke down and I had to drive him to and from work. I’ll bet it broke down again and he tried to hoof it to Swede’s. And got nailed. Jesus. I requested a transfer the very morning he was found, didn’t I, Mr. Ridder?”

  “You did.”

  “I’d rather be sucking gibs out of a turkey than ending up gibs in a field myself.” Jimmy’s lips spread in a wet grin.

  “No doubt,” said Pendergast. “Tell me about your previous job.”

  “I was the night watchman. I was in the plant from midnight to sevenA .M., when the pre-shift arrives.”

  “What does the pre-shift do?”

  “Makes sure all the equipment is working so’s when the first truck arrives the birds can be processed right away. Can’t leave birds in a hot truck that ain’t moving while you fix something, otherwise you got a fine old truckload of dead turkeys.”

  “Does that happen very often?”

  Corrie noticed Jimmy Breen shoot a nervous glance at Ridder.

  “Almost never,” said Ridder quickly.

  “When you were driving to the plant that night,” Pendergast asked, “did you see anything or anyone on the road?”

  “Why d’you think I asked for the day shift? At the time, I thought it was a cow loose in the corn. Something big and bent over—”

  “Where exactly was this?”

  “Midway. About two miles from the plant, two miles from town. On the left-hand side of the road. Waiting, like. It seemed to dart into the corn as my headlights came around the bend. Almost scuttling, like on all fours. I wasn’t sure, really. It might’ve been a shadow. But if so, it was abig shadow.”

  Pendergast nodded. He turned to Corrie. “Do you have any questions?”

  Corrie was seized with panic. Questions? She found Ridder looking at her, his eyes red and narrow.

  “Sure. Yeah. I do.”

  There was a pause.

  “If that was the killer, what was he doing, waiting there? I mean, he couldn’t haveexpected Stott’s car to break down, could he? Might he have been interested in the plant, perhaps?”

  There was a silence and she realized Pendergast was smiling, ever so faintly.

  “Well, hell, I don’t know,” said Jimmy, pausing. “That’s a good one.”

  “Jimmy, damn it,” Ridder suddenly broke in. “You’ve let that turkey get past you.” He shoved forward and grabbed a turkey as it was trundling away. With one great sweep, he reached inside and ripped out the guts by hand, flinging them into the vacuum container, where they were immediately swallowed with a horrible gurgling. Ridder turned back, shaking gore from his fingers with a savage snap of his wrist. He smiled broadly.

  “In my day they didn’t have vacuum hoses,” he said. “You can’t be afraid to get your hands a little dirty on this job, Jimmy.”

  “Yes, Mr. Ridder.”

  He clapped Jimmy on the back, leaving a heavy brown handprint. “Carry on.”

  “We’ve concluded here, I believe,” said Pendergast.

  Ridder seemed relieved. He stuck out his hand. “Glad to be of assistance.”

  Pendergast gave a formal bow, then turned to leave.

  Twenty-Five

  Corrie Swanson stood by the side of the road and watched, hands on her hips, as Pendergast pulled pieces of an odd-looking machine out of the trunk of her car and began screwing them together. When she’d picked him up at the old Kraus place, he’d been standing there by the road, waiting, the box of metal parts lying at his feet. He hadn’t explained what his plan was then, and he seemed disinclined to do so now.

  “You really like to keep people in the dark, don’t you?” she said.

  Pendergast screwed the last piece into place, examined the machine, and turned it on. There was a faint, rising hum. “I beg your pardon?”

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about. You never tell anybody anything. Like what you’re going to do with that thing.”

  Pendergast switched the machine off again. “I find nothing more tiresome in life than explanations.”

  Corrie had to laugh at this. How true it was; from her mother to the school principal to that dickwad of a sheriff,You’ve got some explaining to do, that’s what they all said.

  The sun was rising over the corn, already burning the parched ground. Pendergast looked at her. “Does this curiosity mean you’re warming to the role of my assistant?”

  “It means I’m warming to all the money you’re paying me. And when somebody makes me get up at the crack of dawn, I want to know why.”

  “Very well. Today we’re going to investigate the so-called Ghost Warrior Massacre up at the Mounds.”

  “That looks more like a metal detector than some kind of ghost-busting machine to me.”

  Pendergast shouldered the machine and began to walk up the dirt track that led through the low scrub toward the creek. He spoke over his shoulder. “Speaking of ghosts, do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Believe in them.”

  She snorted. “You don’t really think there’s some scalped, mutilated corpse wandering around up there, looking for his boots or whatever?”

  She waited for an answer, but none came.

  Within minutes, they entered the shade of the trees. Here, a faint, cool breath of night still lingered, mingling with the scent of the cottonwoods. Another few minutes brought them to the Mounds themselves, swelling gently out of the surrounding earth, rocky at the base, sparsely covered with grass and brush along the top. Pendergast paused to turn on the machine once again. The whine went up, then down as he fiddled with the dials. At last, it fell silent. Corrie watched as he slipped a wire out of his pocket, a little orange flag attached to one end, and stuck it in the ground at his feet. From another pocket, he took a thing that looked like a cell phone and started fiddling with it.

  “What’s that?”

  “A GPS unit.”

  Pendergast jotted something down in his ever-present leather notebook and then, with the circular magnetic coil of the metal detector inches from the ground, began to slowly walk north, sweeping the coil back and forth. Corrie followed him, feeling a rising sense of curiosity.

  The metal detector squawked sharply. Pendergast quickly dro
pped to his knees. He began scraping the soil with a palette knife, and within moments he had uncovered a copper arrow point.

  “Wow,” said Corrie. Without even thinking, she knelt by his side. “Is that Indian?”

  “Yes.”

  “I thought they made their arrowheads out of flint.”

  “By 1865, the Cheyennes were just beginning to switch to metal. By 1870, they would have guns. This one metal point dates the site quite accurately.”

  She reached down to pull it up but Pendergast stayed her hand. “It stays in the ground,” he said. Then he added, voice low, “Note the direction it is pointing in.”

  The notebook and GPS reappeared; Pendergast jotted some more notes; they disappeared once again into the jacket of his suit. He placed another little flag at the spot and then continued on.

  They walked for perhaps two hundred yards, Pendergast sweeping as they went, marking every point and every bullet they found. It amazed Corrie how much junk there was under the ground. Then they returned to their point of origin and headed in another cardinal direction. Pendergast swept on. There was yet another squawk. He knelt, scraped, this time uncovering a 1970s-era pop-top.

  “Aren’t you going to flag that historic artifact?” Corrie asked.

  “We shall leave it for a future archeologist.”

  More squawks; more pop-tops, arrow points, a few lead bullets, a rusted knife. Corrie noticed that Pendergast was frowning, as if disturbed by what he was finding. She almost asked the question, and then stopped. Why was she feeling so curious, anyway? This was just as weird as everything else Pendergast had done to date.

  “Okay,” said Corrie, “I’m stumped. What does all this have to do with the killings? Unless, of course, you think the killer is the ghost of the Forty-Fiver who cursed the ground for eternity, or whatever.”

  “An excellent question,” Pendergast replied. “I can’t say at this point if the killings and the massacre are connected. But Sheila Swegg was killed digging in these mounds, and Gasparilla spent a lot of time hunting up at these mounds. And then there’s all the gossip in town, to which you allude, that the killer is the ghost of Harry Beaumont come back for revenge. You may recall that they cut off his boots and scalped his feet.”

  “Youdon’t believe that, do you?”

  “That the killer is the ghost of Beaumont?” Pendergast smiled. “No. But I must admit, the presence of antique arrows and other Indian artifacts does suggest a connection, if only in the mind of the killer.”

  “So what’s your theory?”

  “It is a capital mistake to develop a premature hypothesis in the absence of hard data. I am trying my bestnot to develop a theory. All I wish to do now is collect data.” He continued sweeping and marking. They were now on their third leg, which took them directly over one of the mounds. There was a cluster of points at its rocky base. At several scattered places Pendergast nodded to some fresh holes in the dirt, which someone had made a feeble attempt to hide with brush. “Sheila Swegg’s recent diggings.”

  They continued on.

  “So you don’t haveany ideas about who the killer might be?” Corrie pressed.

  Pendergast did not answer for a moment. When he spoke, his voice was very low. “It is what the killer isnot that I find most intriguing.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “We’re dealing with a serial killer, that much is clear. It is also clear he will keep killing until he is stopped. What I find intriguing is that he breaks the pattern. He is unlike any known serial killer.”

  “How do you know?” Corrie asked.

  “At the FBI headquarters in Quantico, Virginia, there’s a group known as the Behavioral Science Unit, which has made a specialty of profiling the criminal mind. For the past twenty years, they’ve been compiling cases of serial killers from all over the world and quantifying them in a large computer database.”

  Pendergast moved ahead as he spoke, sweeping back and forth as they advanced down the far side of the mound and into the trees beyond. He glanced over at her. “Are you sure you want a lecture in forensic behavioral science?”

  “It’s a lot more interesting than trigonometry.”

  “Serial killing, like other types of human behavior, falls into definite patterns. The FBI has classified serial killers into two types: ‘organized’ and ‘disorganized.’ Organized offenders are intelligent, socially and sexually competent. They carefully plan their killings; the victim is a stranger, selected with care; mood is controlled before, during, and after the crime. The crime scene, too, is neatly controlled. The corpse of the victim is usually taken away and hidden. This type is often difficult to catch.

  “The disorganized killer, on the other hand, kills spontaneously. He is often inadequate socially and sexually, does menial labor, and has a low IQ. The crime scene is sloppy, even random. The body is left at the crime scene; no attempt is made to conceal it. Frequently, the killer lives nearby and knows the victim. The attack is frequently what is known as a ‘blitz’ attack, violent and sudden, with little advance planning.”

  They continued moving on.

  “It sounds like our killer is the ‘organized’ type,” said Corrie.

  “In fact, he is not.” Pendergast paused and looked at her. “This is strong stuff, Miss Swanson.”

  “I can take it.”

  He gazed at her a moment, and then said, almost as if to himself, “I believe you can.”

  There was a whine from the machine, and Pendergast knelt and scraped, uncovering a small, rusted toy car. She saw him smile fleetingly.

  “Ah, a Morris Minor. I had a Corgi collection when I was a child.”

  “Where is it now?”

  A shadow passed across Pendergast’s face and Corrie did not pursue the question.

  “Superficially, our killer does seem to fit the organized type. But there are some major deviations. First, there is a sexual component to virtuallyall organized serial killings. Even if it is not overt, it is there. Some killers prey on prostitutes, some on homosexuals, some on couples in parked cars. Some killers perform sexual mutilations. Some killers rape first and then kill. Some killers just kiss the corpse and leave flowers, as if they had finished a date.”

  Corrie shuddered.

  “These killings, on the other hand, have no sexual component whatsoever.”

  “Go on.”

  “The organized killer also follows a modus operandi, which forensic behavioral scientists call ‘ritual.’ The killings are done ritualistically. The killer will often wear the same clothes for each killing, use the same gun or knife, and perform the killing in exactly the same way. Afterwards, the killer will often arrange the body in a ritualistic fashion. The ritual may not be obvious, but it is always there. It is part of the killing.”

  “That seems to fit our serial killer.”

  “On the contrary, it does not. Yes, our killer performs a ritual. But here’s the catch:it’s a totally different ritual each time. And this killer doesn’t just kill people: he kills animals. The killing of the dog is completely mystifying. There was no ritual at all involved there. It has all the earmarks of the ‘disorganized’ type. He simply killed the dog and ripped off its tail. Why? And the opportunistic attack on John Gasparilla was similar—no ritual, not even an effort to kill. He just, ah, seems to have taken what he needed—the man’s hair and his thumb—and gone away. In other words, these killings share elements of both organizedand disorganized serial killers. This has never been seen before.”

  He was interrupted by an explosive squawk from the metal detector. They had almost reached the end of the test line; ahead of them, the grassy slope descended through a fold of land to the great sea of corn below. Pendergast knelt and began to scrape away the dirt. This time he did not uncover anything. He placed the metal detector directly on the spot and adjusted some dials while the machine continued shrieking in protest.

  “It’s at least two feet down,” he said. A trowel appeared in his hand and he began to
dig.

  In a few minutes, a sizable hole had been excavated. More carefully now, Pendergast trimmed the edges of the hole, going down scant millimeters at a time, until his trowel touched something solid.

  A very small brush appeared in his hand and he began to sweep dirt from the object. Corrie watched over his shoulder. Something began emerging into view: old, twisted, curled up. A few more sweeps revealed it: a single cowboy boot with a hobnail sole. Pendergast lifted it out of the hole and turned it around in his hand. It had been neatly sliced down the back as if with a knife. He looked at Corrie and said:

  “It appears Harry Beaumont wore a size eleven, does it not?”

  There was a shout from behind. A figure was huffing his way out of the Mounds toward them, waving his hands. It was Tad, the deputy sheriff.

  “Mr. Pendergast!” he was calling. “Mr. Pendergast!”

  Pendergast rose as the red-faced, lanky figure came up to them, sweating and blowing.

  “Gasparilla . . . in the hospital. He’s regained consciousness, and—” Tad paused, heaving. “And he’s asking for you.”

  Twenty-Six

  Hazen sat in one of two plastic portable chairs set up outside Gasparilla’s intensive-care room. He was thinking hard: about the first cool nights of fall; buttered corn on the cob; reruns ofThe Honeymooners; Pamela Anderson naked. What he tried very hard not to think about was the incessant moaning and the terrible smell that came from the room beyond, penetrating even the closed door. He wished he could go. He wished to hell he could at least head off to the waiting room. But no: he had to wait here, for Pendergast.

  Jesus Christ.

  And there was the man himself, in full undertaker’s getup as usual, striding down the hall on those long black-clad legs. Hazen rose and reluctantly took the proffered hand. It seemed as if where Pendergast came from they shook hands five times a day. Great way to spread the plague.